A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  The Franchiser is engaged, then, in the naming of names, the names of places and people, of course, but above all the names of things: commercial enterprises of all kinds, name brands, house brands, brandless brands, labels, logos, zits. Elkin composes a song from the clutter of the country, a chant out of that “cargo of crap” that comprises our culture, the signs, poles, boxes, wires, the stores along the roads and highways, our motorcars. He writes with the stock-in-trade and with the salesman’s slang. About the tissues, rags, and wipers that are appropriate to every fixture and furnishing—bowl, screen, or clock face, asshole or cheery cheek—he knows, and taps out the call sign, grasping the peculiar argot of every agency, the specific slant of every occupation, the angle, the outlook—the edge.

  There is, in Elkin, only the “rich topsoil of city asphalt”; there are no lisping winds or drooling streams. He dances to a wholly urban oo-la-la. He cannot see the forest for the picnic tables, the cookout pits, the trash containers with their loose heaps of bottles, Dixie cups, and paper plates; and on those plates he spots the catsup smears, the mustard marks, the crumbs from cookies and potato chips, and he understands at once whether they were reconstituted, ruffled, extra-hearty, baked, or Mexicanized. Nature is a Kodacolor picture wall in one of Ben Flesh’s Travel Inns. It is where you go to get wool for fine suits, wood for boardwalks, walls, ceiling joists, food for fast foods, electric warmth for blankets, power for power tools. There is one moment—you will reach it—when Ben Flesh finds himself in Nature (ominously in, as though she really were the Mother of Us All). “In nature. His scent in the thin air like a signal to the bears, to the cougars. Out of his element, the franchiser disenfranchised. Miles from the culture, from the trademark and trade routes of his own long Marco Polo life.”

  Elkin is not concerned with high culture, either. He knows it not. The city, itself, is his Smithsonian, and there is real lust in his love for it, not merely the usual honor and respect, let alone awe and fear. He has been happily captured by this vast dump of dreck the city has become, and the country has become as it has become a city. He adores this spill of drink and splat of spittle, this rind of flesh, dry ash, and peel of paint, this loud honk the city is, and all its elements; even if it is a steel shaving, this mother of muggers and vulva of vulgarity, this hospice for rape and every kind of wretchedness—the city; although it is only a loud shout, a long hurt, and place of enlarging hate—he loves it, its objects, its stone scapes, lit ways, and glowing windows, this shag of hair and shard of glass the city is; the bag, can, weed, and bitter litter it makes; the cold smoke, the poisoned air it holds; this dog leaving that the city is: Elkin has an embracing passion for it. He celebrates it as no one has done or has been able to do (if we except only Augie March), and although he knows motels, as habitable space, are like the shaven cunt of a packaged whore, still he hums his hymns; although he knows how many streets are ugly, foul-smelling, and dangerous, as full of E. coli as a lower intestine, he warbles away; even though he knows money is society’s perfumed, silver-plattered shit, he goes on loving the prime rate; he knows fame is a faded billboard now for rent, and yet he goes on touching the famous as if they were kings who could cure; he knows, and yet he goes on loving the menace and the waste, the tacky, cheap, lovelorn, gimcrack life our modern lot has all too often come to; he loves it exactly as the saint loves the leper—despite and because—not in blindness or through any failure of taste, but because it is all so deeply and dearly human to him; because, as Rilke put it, it is good just to be here—“Siehe, ich lebe”—since existence itself is outrageously chancy and strange and stable and ordinary (it is like that flameless combustion of gabardine and pee); and all of it—our whole cornpone commercial culture—becomes so transformed by Elkin’s attention, his love and his writing, so changed, altered beyond any emblem, that even an enemy of crud such as I esteem myself to be—grim, bitter, and unforgiving—is won over, and I walk through the dime store in a daze of delight.

  Here then we have no namby-pamby style. The roll call rolls on: wristwatches and lamps, you name it and Elkin will name it; the rhetoric rises like a threatening wind, and the effect is like that of a storm on those who like them: exhilarating, and a little scary.

  It was a hotel, dark except for the light from an open elevator and a floor lamp by one couch. The Oriental carpets, the furniture, the registration desk and shut shops—all seemed a mysterious, almost extinguished red in the enormous empty lobby. Even the elevator—one of four; he supposed the others weren’t functioning—seemed set on low. He looked around for Mopiani but the man had remained at his post. He pressed the button and sensed himself sucked up through darkness, imagining, though it was day, the darkened mezzanine and black ballrooms, the dark lamps and dark flowers in their dark vases on the dark halved tables pressed against the dark walls of each dark floor, the dark silky stripes on the benches outside the elevators, the dark cigarette butts in the dark sand.

  There is no fear of excess here, either, because Elkin oversubscribes to everything. Centers will not hold him in spite of his academic training, his professional position. He goes to extremes simply to have his picture taken standing at an edge. His language carries him away (there is a pileup of images at every corner, like a crash of cars); his characters get carried away; his words first explore, then explode the world.

  He is not content with nice precise observations, in which, for instance, a policeman’s long holster looks like an animal, “its pistol some bent brute at a waterhole, the trigger like a visible genital” (wonderful and radical enough), but the uniform itself becomes a weapon, and then parts of this new mechanism are beautifully described: “the metal blades of Mopiani’s badge, the big key ring with its brass claws, a tunnel of handcuffs doubled on his backside, the weighted, tapered cosh, the sergelike grainy blue hide, the stout black brogans, and the patent-leather bill of his cap like wet ink.”

  He is not satisfied with the simply sensuous (Ben Flesh standing in his tux, “his formal pants and jacket glowing like a black comb, his patent-leather shoes vaulted smooth and tensionless as perfect architecture,” as though he “might be standing in the skin of a ripe bright black apple”). It does not matter that apples are every other color, or that eggplants come close to patent black in their most ebullient moods; just try eggplant instead of apple and feel the effect of the change.

  Not satisfied, never content, Elkin presses beyond his mountains of apparently realistic detail, with their dangerous slides of wit; he passes safely through the misleading forests of simple fun, the satiric gibes, the sirenlike lists; he pushes on into the nuclei of his various vocations (the dance studio, for instance, one of Ben Flesh’s failing franchises), pushes, presses, until they are more than metaphors, more than merely the nice idea that “work for rent” has been set up on signs. He searches inside of whatever one of them possesses his imagination at the moment to find the form—the spreading itch—of the image itself: its finality, its limits, its outer edge; for then that occupation, because it is the wholehearted consequence of a thought that has put on a pair of pants and found a passion that they conceal like an excited penis; this work, with all its learning and its lingo, dreams itself back over the whole world of the fiction like a cloud, settles over us all like a communal hallucination; whereupon we realize that Elkin is a visionary writer; he is Brueghel or he is Bosch; he pictures people at picnics, at weddings; Icarus falls suddenly through the white sky; in the middle of a figure eight a skater dies, a sodden sleeper floats out of the nervous corners of our eyes; and the exuberance with which Ben Flesh has traveled the clover-leafs, generously giving hitching thumbs a ride; his and our relish for existence, for the least as well as the most, for the sweet names of things, turns to dumb drunkenness, to petty meanness, to slobby gluttony; vice emerges like a viper from virtue’s smiling mouth; the dance of life becomes the dance of death, but—more than that—the dance of death is no better off: The bones play like tickled ivories some sugary welcome to the
spring or some soft September song.

  The dance develops, step by step, as Ben Flesh decides to honor his losses with a gala, and trays of slivered turkey and skin-thin beef are bought with a Diner’s Club card and taken to the studio. People are lured in off the street by bribes, and the Wurlitzer is applauded to get in practice for the time when there will be a real band. “Night and Day” is played, and “Happy Days Are Here Again.” A bottle of catsup falls from a shopping bag and spills its blood on the floor, where it soon shows Flesh the paths of the dancers, its “beautiful red evidence” making the music visible. It isn’t long before this mess is mixed with bits of pork and rice, assorted hors d’oeuvres, soft crusts, and chunks of chicken that explode “like delicious gut under the dancer’s weight.” It is a nightmare made out of reality by adding more: Do people tend to put out butts on the ballroom floor? Then let fall a thousand cigs like flaming stars. Do guests incline to crumb their canapés, spill their drinks? Let litter float down upon the party like the ash that preserved Pompeii. Do old folks like to love the old songs? Then let them be set upon by “On the Road to Mandalay.” Elkin plays the real world loud; and by turning up the volume, he has already rendered the hellish glow many a heaven casts before he gets around, in The Living End, to depicting our conventional ones—depictions, however, that rival, recall, revive Brueghel, Bosch.

  The machine plays “The Night Was Meant for Love.” It plays “I’m Sitting on Top of the World.” The dancers continue to turn through their own slop, and Flesh makes a great and crazy speech presumably about convenience (complete convenience, not just that of convenience foods), the total ease of chemical creams, the relief afforded by flowered sheets and pretty pillowcases, the comfort control he calls the real measure of mankind. It is an astonishing replay of the earlier “oration” I mentioned, and there will be others, later, even more amazing. “Nobody, nobody, nobody ever had it so good. Take heed. A franchiser tells you.” Liquor continues to leak from the plastic cups. “Smile, you fuckers, laugh, you shitlings. I come from Fred Astaire, everybody dance!”

  Flesh, in effect, foams at the mouth; he represents America at its best; he is the word become Ben; he utters pure pop; he speaks lite beer; his verbs are coated with a secret recipe, and Vic Tanny keeps his prepositions slim, though his nouns are all frozen custards and spun milk; yet what his long rant is really about is the movement, the form, the true table turning of this incredible novel.

  Vision, I said. For Elkin, it is no visionary’s word, no politician’s promise, preacher’s ploy. It is the unerring instinct of the verbal eye.

  Ben’s name knows the worst: The flesh fails, and Ben is stricken with a scribbler’s sickness; he is MS’d up, to put it as poorly as possible; nevertheless (our author notes), though as illnesses go, MS is truly big-league—while one is sitting down (as authors do), it is an invisible disease. Invisible. Our language, in Elkin’s hands, opens like a paper flower. The symptoms of this sickness are drawn inside out with an unfailing artistry of line. Once again, they circumscribe a vision. It involves the unity of hell and heaven—this vision—even a nervous interplay; it is a vision of value, to complete the vs, of how life is nurtured by decay; it is a victory for the material, for the carnal spirit, because even as Ben weakens, as both his flesh and his Fotomat fold, and the hyperreal world of the novel completes its business and makes its final sale, its hero is having an ecstasy attack; and because love is finally Ben Flesh’s forte, he retains his edge to the end.

  To turn to account … to disable disabilities by finding their use … to celebrate circumstance … to turn on a light in the heart of darkness … well, all flesh is grass, as the prophet said, but the word of the Elkin shall franchise it forever.

  2

  The Living End

  Many of the beliefs mankind enjoys—and we certainly do enjoy most of them—are held like a pan above the fire, close enough to warm them but not so near that any will singe, sear, char, or fry. We are inclined to back off from our beliefs when they begin to turn ugly or unmanageable. Like that face in the morning mirror, it’s there but we no longer look at it. For instance, a lot of us like to believe that we (in some sense that’s comforting) are immortal, that the death that is essential to this life will be overcome and defeated. We may, in addition, be convinced that our life after life could be unpleasant as well as pleasant, disagreeable in the extreme if we aren’t baptized or badly misbehave; and that Dante has pictured it rather well, this pit in inner earth where sinners shall burn for ages like coal-mine fires sometimes do—with implacable anger against their fuel. Of course, we cannot imagine the pleasures of heaven or the pains of hell in other than human, body-borne terms. So we say “it will be like this” but “it will not really be this,” because the fires of hell do not consume or even singe, sear, char, or fry—not really—since a few poor souls must fry forever, seared and seared again, requiring some tatter of spirit to remain to be singed afresh, some cut of body and sliver of sense to survive and relay the pain to that corner of consciousness set aside for the torment intended.

  The damned are forbidden to forget, sleep, or faint.

  Dante often imagined metaphors made mundane and hammered flat in the inferno’s forges so that those who, in effect, ate their children little by little while they lived would be forced, in fact, to eat them bite by bite the way the starving Ugolino, like a constipation clogging the bottom of the universe, is compelled to gnaw the skull of his own betrayer—an archbishop no less—and wipe his blood-smeared mouth with the prelate’s hair, because he was suspected, while nailed with his kids in a castle tower for his several treacheries, of becoming a cannibal to his children. There is always this problem with literalizing a figure of speech: All its aspects should be dealt with equally; but we never … we never do that … because, as in the case before us, if our flesh is not really fuel, if it burns but does not burn up (and just imagine the amount of oxygen with which Hell must be constantly supplied), then it isn’t fuel, isn’t burned, and cannot consequently cause the pain we might have experienced when nipped at the stove by a pan lid, for instance, an affliction that could be cooled and soothed and a smart that was mean but momentary. So this pain we are promised is a fiction, and the fires are fictions, too, since our flesh is not like gas to be charged for by the BTU, but is returned to its body to be burned again as though an eyeball, muscle, lymph node, or rib had been rented. Yet even a rental—tux or car or folding chair—will wear out. In Hell, everyone is in poor health, yet no one may die. Our corpses may lie in ruins, but our ruins dare not rot … well, not utterly. Eternity won’t let them.

  To live on endlessly … all of us … How often do we seriously contemplate what that might mean? Boswell hoped that Hume would keep his atheism on a short leash when death knocked, and went to the philosopher’s bedside when illness was apparently winning its war with him to hear what Hume thought about his future at such a crucial hour. Indeed, Boswell hoped to be comforted by Hume’s expected backslide of mind, but when asked whether “it was not possible that there might be a future state,” Hume replied that “it was possible that a piece of coal put upon the fire would not burn,” and added that immortality was “a most unreasonable fancy.” Boswell tells us that this answer made him feel “like a man in sudden danger eagerly seeking his defensive arms.” The arms he found were his mother’s and Dr. Johnson’s.

  Stanley’s divinity calls upon all the dead who are somehow missing, and not properly interred, to congregate on the last day, but who knows in what condition? Wet as we first were when we fell into the sea? Or cold as we’ve been in glacial ice? Or in the same scattered bits to which a car bomb blew us? If and when the earth throws back its covers, coffins pop their lids, and we are resurrected, will it be in our prime, as we died, with the cancer that gnawed us nearly in half still greedy? Or with the erection we were sporting when our heart failed? We do not inquire. Or if, after death, we are only souls, as immaterial as time is said to be, what will distinguish
mine from yours? My memories? At five, when I had little to recall? At eighty-five, when I no longer knew my name? We do not inquire. If souls are all the same, as some believe, then It, not I, is immortal. For It, I do not care a fig. I want to know what screams while it roasts in Hell or strums the strings in Heaven—tirelessly—and for whose ears?—whose agony and whose inattention?—forever and ever.

  Perpetuities, eternities, infinities, immortalities: troublesome concepts, worse realities.

  What if … Stanley Elkin wondered on his way to and from the bathroom in the middle of the night. “What if all this stuff about heaven and hell were true? Literally.” It was a middle-of-the-night idea, flown in from dream, so was it as wonderful as he thought? And would he even remember it in the morning? He woke his wife, Joan, to verify its value and, lest he forget, to bear it for him in tomorrow’s mind. He needn’t have troubled her, for the next morning the words that went with the idea lit like pigeons on the page, and the first story, “Conventional Wisdom,” already conceived to be the left panel of three, began its confident unfolding. The ultimate result, a fan made of three sections, called The Living End, is, at this writing, twenty-six years old, which makes it middle-aged by fiction’s count, because novels not only age more rapidly than dogs; their first years are measured in review days and remainder weeks. It is the final volume of the Dalkey Archive Press’s reissue of Stanley Elkin’s fiction. George Mills, Elkin’s most ambitious work, keeps it company, as it did in the beginning, since The Living End popped up in the midst of George Mills like a volunteer in a formal flower bed. Even its composition, brisk as it was, took two years, because it was written during lulls in the long novel’s more tortuous course.

  Conventional wisdoms are like dodgem cars—ineptly steered and always colliding. Good deeds will not go unrewarded, in the next life if not in this one, but we had better read the deed’s fine print, for it is also true that no good deed goes unpunished. Nor are our most immediate notions of what might be a fit punishment for a particular crime to be trusted or that authority granted to W.S. Gilbert’s divine Mikado, an expert, like Dante, in these matters. Ugolino, we need to remember, is placed on Cocytus, Hell’s frozen lake, by Dante’s decision, and therefore for treason and not because he may have eaten his children. The teeth he has sunk in his enemy’s skull are his revenge and the archbishop’s punishment, but both of these practiced betrayers are cold in Cain’s country because, in a feudal society, fealty is more essential than blood to the life of each fief.